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Tue, September 23, 2008

PDF Security Pain: We Told You So

By Rich

Thanks to Slashdot, here’s a story on Adobe PDF vulnerabilities:

The Portable Document Format (PDF) is one of the file formats of choice commonly used in today”s enterprises, since it’s widely deployed across different operating systems. But on a down-side this format has also known vulnerabilites which are exploited in the wild.

I normally ignore stories coming out of vendor labs on new exploits that are coincidentally blocked by said vendor’s products, but on occasion they highlight something of interest.

Back in February I mentioned three applications that are a real pain in our security behinds- IE/ActiveX, QuickTime, and Adobe Acrobat (the entire pdf format, to be honest). It’s nice to see a little validation. Each of these, in their own way, allows expansion of their formats.

In the Adobe case they keep shoveling all sorts of media types and scripting into the format. This creates intense complexity that, more often than not, leads to security vulnerabilities. When you manage an open format, content validation/sanitization is an extremely nasty problem. Unless you design your code for it from the ground up, it’s nearly impossible to keep up and lock down a secure format. I suspect Adobe’s only real option at this point is to start failing with grace and focus on anti-exploitation and sandboxing (if that’s even possible, I’ll leave it up to smarter people than me).

Truth is I should have also put Flash on the list. My bad.

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One Reply to “PDF Security Pain: We Told You So”

LuigiG September 24, 2008 at 2:06 pm

This is positively insane. PDF should have been frozen (feature-wise) a decade ago!

Well, If you are on OS X you won’‘t need that “would you like to install my dog, my family and my friends too” trojan-like thing called Adobe Reader.

Not to say that Preview is more secure, only much less annoying.

-LG

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